


Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dancer

by melannen



Category: Deadpool (Movieverse)
Genre: Fluff, Found Family, Grief/Mourning, I'm pretty sure Wade is reading these tags so I'm not going into detail in them, Mpreg, Team, Vomiting, but all the really bad stuff is just referenced, content warning: deadpool, except the vomit so much, not post-credits-scene compliant, not reality compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 06:13:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14731472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: "That's stage four, depression," Al said, sitting on his ankles and chewing very loudly on her sandwich. "But I don't know how the hell you'd tell the difference with you. Besides, vomiting isn't any stage of grief." She thought that over, then added, "Except for the stage that comes after the drinking stage, but you already did that one."





	Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dancer

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. This is definitely a thing I wrote just now. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> I'm kind of shaky on X-Men movie canon, but then so is X-Men movie canon, so just assume anything that isn't right out of Deadpool 2 is based on something or other that I learned between today and the time I was nine and stuck at church for six hours with nothing to read but the backs of a complete set of 1992 X-Men trading cards.

Wade had been crashing with Al again since they got Russell all settled in Westchester with the X-Nerds. He _could_ get his own place, since he had plenty of dirty murder lucre still tucked away in various hidey-holes, including under the couch where he was currently dramatically draped.

He'd been dramatically draped over the couch in various poses for the last month or so. He didn't really feel like doing anything else. He would say it kind of felt like somebody has scooped out his guts and replaced them with something else, except that happened to him once and it didn't feel anything like this.

"Is there a phase of grief where you don't feel anything at all?" he asked Al, who had just walked into the room with a pastrami sandwich in one hand. As soon as he smelled it, he had to lean over and retch into the bucket that had been conveniently parked next to the couch. "And you vomit all the time?" he added, as he wiped his mouth on the hem of his t-shirt.

"That's stage four, depression," Al said, sitting on his ankles and chewing very loudly on her sandwich. "But I don't know how the hell you'd tell the difference with you. Besides, vomiting isn't any stage of grief." She thought that over, then added, "except for the stage that comes after the drinking stage, but you already did that one."

He hadn't been wanting alcohol, either. Weasel probably thought he was finally properly dead. Al's chewing noises made him retch again, but there wasn't much left to bring up.

"I haven't felt this comprehensively shit since the last time I was dying of cancer," he said, then "Ooh! Do you think I'm dying of cancer again? Maybe my healing factor fucked itself just when I decided to live again! That would be ironic! Like rain on my wedding day. Or a traffic jam when you’re already late. A lot of people think those aren’t actually ironic but they are, it’s called situational irony, as you would know if you were Canadian,” he explained.

“You’re not dying of fucking cancer,” Al said. “I’ve been through this with my damn niece after _her_ man got shot by gangbangers. Didn’t think anything could be worse than her moaning about it, but here you are.”

“You know what’s wrong with me? Is it lupus? Am I going to start vomiting mucous and build a cocoon? ‘Cause that’s, like, the absolutely coolest way to get a secondary mutation.”

“You’re preggers,” Al said.

“What?”

“Knocked up, bun in the oven, harboring a fugitive,” she said. “A tiny mindless parasitical prehistoric fish-thing has stolen half your chromosomes and is now siphoning off your energy by tapping into your bloodstream. You’re eating for two, and then having technicolor reruns. I hope you don’t think I’m going to be the one scrubbing out that bucket, by the way,” she added.

Wade yanked his legs out from under her ass and sat up, suddenly more energized than he’d been in weeks. “I’m pregnant?” he said. “I’m _pregnant_! I _told_ her it was worth a try!”

Wade went to Cable’s apartment to share the good news. Cable was cleaning his guns. “Wade,” he grunted. “Good to see you up and about.” 

Domino was there too, for some reason. “You’re looking bright-eyed and busy-tailed today,” she said from her perch on the back of the couch.

“Yeah, can you see the glow already?" Wade asked, and then, temporarily distracted, "What are you doing here?” According to the last e-mail he’d had from Russell, she was still at the X-Mansion playing den mommy to the Essex kids. “Have you two already hooked up? I guess we’re going with a compressed timeline here.”

“We’re not ‘hooking up’” Domino said, with the little finger wiggles. “I just got this feeling that if I visited Cable today, I would be witness to something great.”

“Oh. Okay,” Wade shrugged. “Fair enough. So I can share the good news with both of you at once!”

“What’s the good news?” Cable asked.

“Al says I’m pregnant!”

Domino burst out laughing and then fell of the back of the couch. “There it was!” she said from the floor behind it. “Definitely worth the bus ride from Westchester.”

“Why do you think you're pregnant,” Cable said, without looking up from the guns.

“I don't _think_ , I _know_ ,” Wade said, and flopped into a conveniently-placed armchair. This pregnancy thing was exhausting. “I have all the symptoms - fatigue, nausea and vomiting, insatiable sexual appetite, mood swings, uncontrollable cravings for Mexican food, I haven’t bled in a month, heck, the author went down a whole advice list for mpreg writers - look, I even have stretch marks already!”

“Put your shirt back down, Wade,” Cable said without looking up.

“Did nobody ever explain to you where babies come from, Wade?” Domino asked, vaulting into the seat beside him.

“When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, they fuck a lot, and then they have a proper adult conversation about wanting to build a family, and they get married, and they communicate their emotions in a healthy way in order to make the marriage strong, and then one of them gets their IUD removed, and then the other one cries a lot about their daddy issues, and then they have a ton of unprotected penetrative sex, and if they still love each other very much, eventually somebody gets pregnant, or maybe you hire a surrogate or buy some randomized sperm or do a dark magic ritual or something, but I caught already so I don't think we'll have to worry about that.” He scowled at them. “Are you implying Ness and I didn’t love each other enough? Because we definitely did all the other important steps.”

Domino looked like she was going to cry for some reason, which didn’t make sense, because this was _happy_ news. He was going to be a mommy! Just like they’d planned!

“We would never imply that, Wade,” Cable said, finally looking up at him. Oh, right, Wade wasn’t the only one who had recently lost everyone he loved in a horrible tragedy. Oops. But they were making a new family together, a found family! A Team family! It was a happy ending! And this story wasn’t tagged angst, he’d checked the headers when he realized he was going to bring a baby into it! And Cable was part of that family too, just as much as the baby would be, even if he wasn’t blood related to anyone in this continuity!

“I think what you missed, Wade,” Domino said, “is that usually - at least 90% of the time - it’s the mommy who gets pregnant, not the daddy.”

“Yeah, so? Ness was the daddy at _least_ half the time when we were fucking.”

“If you’re transgendered, it might have been polite to mention that _before_ you invited me to stab you in the genitals,” Cable added.

“Don’t be a dick, Cable,” Deadpool said, “I’m not trans, crossdressing doesn’t imply anything about gender identity. You really need to keep working on that little bigotry problem.”

Domino crossed her arms. “Okay, so if you're going to make me go there, I guess the actual minimum requirement for getting pregnant is a uterus. Do you have a uterus, Wade?”

“Who knows?” Wade said. “I just grew back my entire lower torso a month ago.”

Cable clicked the last part back into his awesome gun. “Are you actually experiencing nausea and fatigue?” he asked.

“Bring me a chimichanga from the truck down the street and I’ll demonstrate,” Wade said.

"You shouldn't be having those kinds of symptoms unless there's something very wrong with your healing factor. You should go ask Henry McCoy for a consult while you're still on speaking terms with the X-Men."

"Have you really not bled for a month?" Domino said.

"I've been taking it easy. Taking some me time. _Gestating_ ," he added pointedly. "And having a baby is a perfectly natural and healthy stage of life, I don't need to see a doctor."

"Your healing factor could have interacted poorly with the chrono-radiation from close proximity to time travel combined with the suppression collar," Cable said. "You should see a mutant doctor."

"Your time travel can screw with healing factors?" Wade asked.

"Do you know if your healing factor can screw with time travel?"

"Fuck no," Wade said. "No idea."

"You should see a mutant doctor. It would be a shame if you died of cancer after I gave up my ride home. _For you_."

"....that's playing dirty, man."

Domino pulled out her phone and said cheerfully, "I'll call ahead and let them know we're coming!"

 

There were more people in the mansion this time, which was the best evidence yet that this was a fanfic - usually the male pregnancy would have been enough to be sure, but this was X-thing-verse, so weirder things had happened just in Cable's backstory. But getting a bunch of random licensed characters together as if they didn't have to pay extra or negotiate with editors for every one, that was definitely a fanfic thing, the author even wrote an entire crossover meta fic about that once.

Colossus made them wait in the big lobby area while somebody went to tell Dr. McCoy they were there, but that was fine, there was lots of interesting stuff to do while sitting on some spindly under-upholstered chair in the lobby. For example, there were a whole rainbow-lgbt-oppression-metaphor of students and X-Men wandering in and out, and that was always fun people watching. There was Cyclops, whose mutation was having the least interesting personality in existence! There was the one with the pigeon wings! There was one who was was literally writhing with maggots, who must have been a student because they were wearing a backpack and eating what smelled like cafeteria pepperoni pizza, if "spitting maggots onto it and then swallowing them again" counted as eating.

Oh, oops, there went the vomiting again. And the antique oriental carpet. At least he hadn't thrown up in the mask yet.

"Wade!" Colossus. "That was not funny!"

"What?" Wade asked, and the he realized everyone was staring at him, and the kid with the pizza looked like they were about to cry. Black oil tears, but still tears.

"Oh, whoa, wait! It wasn't - it was the pizza! Morning sickness! I have issues with strong umami smells right now - look, I know I'm legendarily tasteless but even I have limits, okay? You're beautiful, sweetheart, I had maggots myself once, _Diptera_ are the greatest, I just can't handle the smell of pepperoni."

The kid gave him a suspicious look and left with their friends, but at least they didn't look like they were about to cry anymore.

"Morning sickness, Wade?" Colossus asked skeptically.

"He really is sick," Domino said. "He threw up three times on the bus on the way here. Luckily there always happened to be someone in the seat in front of us who truly deserved it."

"Riding the bus with you was fun," Wade said. "We should do that again someday."

Russell came skidding up to them then, bookbag barely hanging over one shoulder. "Wade!" he said. "I heard you were sick! Because of what you did to help me!"

"I'm fine," Wade said, and then looked down at the little puddle of vomit. " _Mostly_ fine. I'd hug you right now but maybe not a great idea for me to try to stand up."

"It's all my fault, isn't it," he said, his face crumpling. "You're going to die after all, and it'll be my fault."

"No!" Wade said, and then realized he was going to have to go full Parental Figure. Oh, well, he'd need the practice soon enough. "I'm not dying, and it's not your fault, it's nothing to do with you. C'mere, hug me anyway."

He did. Russell was still a good hugger, Wade thought. Very warm, even when he wasn't trying to burn you to death.

He pulled back and said, "So if you're not dying, what's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong!" Wade said, and spread his arms. "I'm pregnant!"

"You're... what?" Russell said, and carefully stepped back even farther.

"I'm having a baby! You're going to be a big brother!"

"You're not pregnant, Wade," Cable said.

"Actually, he is," said a voice that cut through the general noise of the lobby a lot better than it should have. Xavier wheeled up through them, the streams of people parting like a sea, and tilted his head, and smiled. "Less than two months, I'd say, and probably a girl. You can never tell for sure of course, especially this early, with the brain barely more than a cluster of neurons, but she feels like a girl."

Wade stared at him blankly. "What?" he said.

"You're pregnant, Mr. Wilson," Xavier said softly. "Congratulations."

"No no no," Wade waved his hands around. "I can't be pregnant, I don't have the right parts, just ask Domino there, I'm not pregnant, I'm just slowly dying of cancer because my healing factor can't keep up anymore because Nate and/or the magic prison collars broke it, the pregnancy thing is me being crazy and failing to deal with my wife dying. We established this."

"Well," McCoy, coming up behind Xavier and rolling a rubber glove up over his furry forearm, "I suppose we'll have to take you to the infirmary and find out for sure. But frankly, I wouldn't bet against the Professor." Then he looked down and made a face. "Scott," he called across the room. "You're on vomit patrol today, aren't you? We need sawdust over here."

"You have someone on vomit patrol today?" Wade asked, fascinated. "Did a precog tell you I was coming?"

"This is a school, Mr. Wilson," McCoy said as he steered him toward the stairs. "We teach kindergarteners through 19-year-olds. We always have someone on vomit patrol."

 

"Yep, he's pregnant," McCoy said sometime later, pulling the rubber gloves off. He hadn't even stuck any fingers in interesting places, it was all boring medical imaging and tissue samples, so Wade wasn't sure why he'd bothered putting them on in the first place. "That's definitely a genus _Homo_ embryo in there."

"Awww, I have a little baby homo," Wade cooed, and rubbed his stomach.

"In _where_?" Domino asked.

"Not a uterus, that's for sure," he said. "But there's what looks like a healthy placenta and amnion attached to the mesentery. Normally in a case like this we'd be worried about internal bleeding, but as far as I can tell the healing factor is completely unaffected, so we probably don't need to worry about the health of the... parent."

"Mother," Wade said.

"You know if a man carries the pregnancy, he can still be the baby's father," Cable pointed out.

"Yeah but I'd be a terrible single father, I want to be the mother instead."

McCoy shrugged. "Health of the mother, then."

"So if you're the mother, who's the father?" Domino asked.

"Ness, obviously!" Wade said. What a silly question.

"Ness would be the late Vanessa Wilson, nee Carlysle?" McCoy asked carefully.

"Ness was never late, she was always on time, like clockwork," Wade said. "She didn't get a chance to be late anyway, she only had her IUD out - _fuck_ ," he said, and then folded over himself so nobody would notice the crying.

"I've taken some tissue samples, and I'd like to look at the imaging results more closely," McCoy said, while Wade was busy not looking up at them, and grabbing the kleenex somebody - Cable? Really? that felt like metal fingers, and Colossus had left when the backless paper gown appeared - was handing him. "Honestly, I'm not sure we can say anything about this based on a... typical pregnancy. There may not be another parent. I'm not even sure how the embryo _got_ there, but Wade's healing factor is on a whole different scale than any others I've worked with, so we're off the edge of the map. Hopefully, I can tell you more when I've looked at rest of the results. Wade, would you like to be alone for awhile?"

"Yes," Wade said through his folded hands.

 

"Hi Wade!" someone said from the door of the exam room.

He looked up and waved back. How could he _not_ , she was _adorable_. "Hi Yukio!" he said.

"I heard you're going to be a mom!" she said, bouncing up and down.

"I _am_!" he said. "It's _so great_!"

"You can go _maternity clothes shopping_!" she said.

"Oh my _god_ ," Wade said. "We can go maternity clothes shopping! Yukio, will you go maternity clothes shopping with me?"

"Ye-es, obviously!" she said.

"So you got knocked up, huh," Neg said. "What happened to being a role model, Wade?"

He pointed at her. "You want to turn 18, get married, get a steady job, and have a long discussion with your wife about the consequences of building a family before you discontinue birth control, I will be there with you every step of the way. Until then, stay in school." He squinted. "Also, you're coming maternity clothes shopping with us."

"Sure, why not," Neg said.

"And we can buy _tiny baby dresses_ too," Wade said.

"Yes!" Yukio said.

"C'mon, Yukio, we're going to be late to class," Neg said. "I'm glad you're feeling better, Wade."

"Bye Wade!" Yukio said.

"Bye Yukio!" Wade said.

Neg was right, he did feel better.

Not a lot better, he puked twice more before McCoy came back, but better. _Tiny baby dresses_. He could get her tiny stripper heels to remind her of her dad! And her mom! It would be _so cute_.

"Mr. Wilson," McCoy said as he stepped in. "Feeling better?"

"What happened to Wade?"

"What happened is that this is the part where I ask you if you're sure you want to continue the pregnancy," McCoy said. "Also, you refuse to call me Hank."

"Why would I call you Hank when 'Dr. McCoy' is an option? And duh, of course I'm keeping the baby."

"That's exactly why I always ask people to call me Hank," he said. He sat down on a stool next to the exam table where Wade was still perched. "Look, you don't have to decide now. You've been through a lot in the last couple of months. I just want to let you know it's an option. Your healing factor would make it tough, but if at any point in the next three months you change your mind, you just have to tell me, and we can talk about your options again, okay? We can let your family think it was a medical necessity if you don't want them to know."

Wade squinted at him. "You give that speech to a lot of teenage girls?"

"Less often than I was afraid I would have to when we started this school," McCoy said. "Kids these days are a lot more responsible and informed than I remember being at that age."

"Yeah, kids are pretty great," Wade said dreamily. "Me and Ness were going to have a family, and this is the last I have of her, I'm not giving her up."

"About that," McCoy said. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. "Your wife passed away just over six weeks ago, yes?"

"Yes." Wade frowned at him.

"Would you feel any differently if the baby wasn't hers?"

"Of course it's hers! I'm not that kind of girl." Wade said, then frowned. "Or is it like, an immaculate conception? Is it a tiny baby clone Deadpool messiah? Ooh, wait till I tell her she gets to be Jesus's stepdad."

"No, I checked that right away, there are definitely two parents. But the baby's at just about exactly six weeks gestation, which means _four_ weeks since conception. Don't ask why, the explanation's not worth the trouble. But that means you didn't start the pregnancy until well after she had passed. I'm not ruling it out - this is in no way a typical pregnancy - but from what I can tell, the growth rate is absolutely normal. So I don't think the timing works."

"It's... not... It's someone else? But I haven't slept with anybody else in _ages_! Lap dances for targets don't count!" He thought about it for a second. "Would it count if we had sex while we were both dead?"

"Wade. How."

"Oh, it's Wade now?"

"It's Wade now that I'm trying to visualize how you could have had sex with your wife's corpse while you were _both_ dead!"

"Not like _that_!" he said. "That would be prohibitively hard to engineer! I would probably have to rig, like, counterweights and stuff. Also you're a pervert, wow, I did _not_ know that about you. I meant in the _afterlife_."

"You had sex with your wife in the afterlife, while you were temporarily dead."

"Pretty sure," he said, swinging his legs under the exam table.

"I'm afraid the question of the afterlife is outside my ambit," he said, and rubbed his eyes again. "Look, I've helped several women with healing factors through pregnancies. Nobody on your level, and all natural mutations, but - the healing factor seems to recognize a partner's sperm, and their contribution to the baby's genetics, as something that's part of maintaining a healthy body, and supports the pregnancy. As far as I can tell, at some point about a month ago, another person's DNA was introduced to your body, and for some reason, your healing factor interpreted it the way it would a conception attempt. I don't think a natural healing factor would do that, and yours clearly doesn't do it every time that happens, but your mutation is... special."

"What do you mean, 'introducing another person's DNA to my body'? I don't go introducing strangers' DNA to my body willy-nilly!"

"All it would take, from what I can tell," Dr. McCoy said, "was someone else's body fluid making contact with an open wound on your lower torso. Did that happen at all, about a month ago?"

About a month ago was when they'd broken Russell out of the convoy and then fought everybody at the Essex school. That had been fun. But, okay, _maybe_ he hadn't been super-careful about fluid contact. In his defense, he'd been ripped in half at the waist and had lots of other things to worry about. And even when he wasn't ripped in half at the waist, he lower torso was often mostly open wounds. So was his upper torso. And everywhere else.

"So who's the dad then?" he asked. "I hope it's not Juggernaut."

" _I_ hope it's not Juggernaut. Jesus, mary, and joseph," McCoy said. "Look, I can't just look at the genotype and tell you who the other parent is, that's not how this works. I need samples to compare. If you can get me a list, we can start running matches, and try to find out."

"So you don't know? It could still be Ness?"

"About all I can tell you right now is that the embryo has 23 normal chromosome pairs, including two X-chromosomes, and an X-gene. You don't have an X-gene, so it's fairly likely the other parent did. Was Vanessa a mutant?"

"She never said," Wade told him sadly.

"Not everybody knows, if it's a minor mutation and they never had reason to be tested. Do you have anything we could get a DNA sample from to check?"

"I blew up her apartment with her in it."

"So no. Any closely related family members?"

"She never said."

"All right. Get me a list of other possibilities, and we'll do what we can to narrow it down. In the meantime, you're badly dehydrated from the morning sickness; your healing factor is handling it for you, but it'll stress the baby if you're chronically low on fluids. We could try you on some anti-nausea treatments - how quickly does your healing factor take care of meds?"

"I burned through half a kilo of cocaine in about five minutes once."

"That would be 'fast', then. Can you take a saline IV?"

"What's the alternative for people who can't take an IV?"

McCoy grinned with all his teeth. "Hydration enemas."

"I can take an IV," he said quickly. "I prefer to keep the medical kink yiffing in my own bedroom, thanks. But you might have to stab me again every fifteen minutes or so."

"Good, because I _also_ prefer to keep the medical kink in my own bedroom. Look, I'd like to keep you here at least until we get the vomiting under control and the hydration situation handled, if that's okay with you. You're welcome to stay as long as you need, you know - I don't think they'll be putting you on a team again anytime soon, but you'd be on medical leave even if they wanted to, and that's not actually _required_ to claim sanctuary here. And we do offer parenting classes as needed. Mostly for the students' parents, but not always."

"Wow," Wade said. "Parenting classes. That's a lot. Okay. Fine. We'll make a list. But she's still Ness's baby no matter who the bio-dad is, just so you know."

McCoy looked at him like Cookie Monster would look if somebody had told him he was on a gluten-free diet. Wade didn't know why _McCoy_ was sad, _he_ wasn't the one with a dead wife, but whatever.

"The official date of conception is going to be six weeks ago," McCoy said. "So legally, you were married at the time, and she'll be Ness's baby unless somebody contests it. Given the circumstances, I don't think anyone will contest it if you want her on the birth certificate. So congratulations. You and your wife are going to have a baby."

"Hooray!" Wade said, and then threw up again.


End file.
